


Conversations With A Tombstone

by feverpitchfiasco



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock - Fandom, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cemetery, First Kiss, Flowers, Fluff, It sort of hurts and then it all stops hurting, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Reunion, Smoking, reunited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverpitchfiasco/pseuds/feverpitchfiasco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John visits Sherlock's grave on a weekly basis. This week's conversation goes a little differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations With A Tombstone

**Author's Note:**

> I've been listening to Panic! At The Disco's "Nicotine" a lot. It's a pretty good song for a lot of ships, haha. It's what inspired the mental image of John smoking to remember Sherlock.

If there was ever a man to appreciate a good solid routine, it was John Watson. His weekly visits to Sherlock’s grave fell right into an orderly pattern. At precisely 1:45pm every Wednesday afternoon, he’d head to the cemetery with a different kind of flower, a book of matches, and a pack of cigarettes. Sherlock’s brand, of course. If he was having a particularly stressful week, he’d forgo the cigarettes in favor of Nicotinell patches. He always made sure to tell Sherlock how many patches his stress levels were at, and would always end up peeling them off by the time he was finished talking.

One summer afternoon found John lounging against the sleek black face of Sherlock’s headstone. He had a cigarette dangling precariously between relaxed fingers, bringing it up for the occasional drag to punctuate his speech. 

“You’d have loved this case, Sherlock. It was straight out of one of those weird medical shows we used to watch. This guy’s been having intermittent abdominal pain for ages, right? Doesn’t think much of it other than ‘I’m an old guy who eats crap food’. Only gets one or two twinges a month. Finally, it starts hurting REALLY bad, so he comes to see me. I do an xray and right there, on the film, is a pair of fucking surgical forceps! So we go right into surgery and remove them. He came back later to give me a pen and show me a picture. He mounted the forceps in a shadow box! Can you believe that?” A pause, and a cloud of smoke blows away in the light breeze. 

“I wish you were still around to have seen it. I wish you were still around period. I miss you, Sherlock. Life just.. Isn’t the same without you. I’m trying to move on, but god. It’s so hard. I hate to say this, but I’m sure you’d understand. Sometimes I don’t think you being gone is the worst part of it. I mean, obviously it’s right up there. But you’re not the first person I’ve lost. I watched my friends die in the army. Sometimes by a bullet, sometimes in the OR. No. Sometimes I think the worst part is that when you died, all the excitement and color in my life died too. Everything that made it worth getting out of bed in the morning. Mycroft had it pegged, way back then. I’m not haunted by the war. I miss it. I miss you. God, I miss our life together.” John’s voice broke over the last few words. Shaking fingers brought the cigarette to trembling lips before he completely broke down. Buried his head in his hands and sobbed. 

“I thought I could do this without you, Sherlock. I thought I could keep going. But I can’t! Fuck, I can’t do anything. Lestrade’s been trying to get me to help with cases. Did you know? He thinks I could be helpful. I’m not you. Why is he pretending that I could ever replace you? Why is he ASKING me to replace you? You performed miracles, Sherlock. I’m convinced of it. And then you fucking left me! FUCK YOU! You came into my life, and you made it worth living, and then you LEFT. I want to hate you. I want to hate you so very much. For coming into my life and showing me a better way to live. A better way to spend my life. But I can’t. I can’t hate you, Sherlock, as much as I’ve tried. I bring you fucking flowers every week because I’m in love with you. Was in love with you. Still am. Not that these feelings do anything but drive me to smoke these horrid cigarettes. I hate smoking. I only took it up because it makes me feel closer to you. I went into your room. After you… after. You must have snuck a smoke. I could smell it. There was a partial pack on your window sill and I chain smoked every single one. Just sat at the kitchen table with that damned palace ashtray and chain smoked. Mrs. Hudson wasn’t happy, let me tell you. I sort of.. snapped at her. I couldn’t stand seeing the pity in her eyes. And I missed you so much. I missed you, you were gone, she pitied me, and I was so sick from smoking seven cigarettes right in a row.” He stopped again, waiting for his sobs to slow before finishing off the cigarette and stubbing it out on the sole of his boot. Pulling out a new one, he lit it with a practiced flick of a match.

“Anyway. I brought you flowers. I know you weren’t a flower kind of guy, but I like to have something of color here. Something other than this fucking black monolith of a headstone. You weren’t just a blank slab, Sherlock. You’re more than two words on a chunk of stone. So I brought you flowers. Red tulips. They’re a decl--” 

“Declaration of love. I didn’t know you were a flower guy either.” A deep baritone voice rang out behind John, causing him to startle and scramble to his feet. There was no mistaking that voice. 

“Sherlock? But.. Why aren’t you DEAD?” John sputtered at him, his eyes still rimmed red. He took a half step forward, reaching out slightly. Sherlock glanced down and plucked the cigarette from his hand. After a deep drag, he held the smoke for a second before tilting his head back and blowing it out.

“I’m supposed to be dead. Moriarty wanted me dead. Well, he wanted me to kill myself, to be precise. Jumping off of St. Bart’s was good enough for him, so I did jump. I just didn’t do it in a way that’d kill me. Took some last minute figuring out, but I realized that --” He was cut off by a fist connecting with his jaw. 

“I don’t care HOW you fucking did it, you son of a bitch! I want to know WHY. I want to know why you decided that the best plan of action was to fake your death and then show up two years later!” John rubbed his knuckles, face blooming red and tears springing to his eyes again. 

“How…” Sherlock stared at him, openly confused for a second. Rubbing his jaw, his lip curled into a snarl. “How does ‘saving your life’ sound? And Lestrade’s. And Mrs. Hudson’s. Moriarty had three snipers with three bullets for you guys. They each had orders to only back down under two circumstances. Either Moriarty told them to back off, or I jumped. Seeing as how he stuck a gun in his mouth, the only other option was to jump! So yes, John. I faked my death and then spent the last two years running around the world and killing the rest of his men. To keep you guys safe. Mycroft only ever barely knew what part of the world I was in.” Sherlock fell silent, unable to read the expression on John’s face. 

“Mycroft?! He got to know you weren’t dead, but I wasn’t good enough for that knowledge? Fuck, Sherlock! What the hell?! No, seriously. What. The. Hell? Who else knew you were alive?” John tried to keep his features carefully schooled, but the anger shone through.

“Only Molly. She officially declared my death.” Sherlock took a half step back from the storm clouds on John’s face. 

“Molly knew. Great. So all those times I sat in the morgue with her and bawled my eyes out at her, she had to keep the truth from me. Do you even realize what that must have done to her? Did you even think this through? Or did you just jump into it and damn the consequences because you didn’t have to pay them?” John pinched the bridge of his nose tightly and took a deep breath through his mouth, letting it hiss out his nostrils.

“Don’t you think it was hard for me too, John? You still had Baker street. You still had London, and everyone we know. I had rat infested alleyways and blood stained hotel rooms. I spent two years chasing people through the filthiest depths of society and killing people. All for the safety of people I couldn’t even talk to! Don’t you think I’d have let you know that I was alive if I thought it was at all safe to do so?” Sherlock tugged at fistfuls of his hair, spinning on his heel and turning away. 

“That shouldn’t have been a call you had to make by yourself in the first place! If you hadn’t taken on so much by yourself, maybe you wouldn’t have had to leave for two years. So FUCK YOU, Sherlock!” With that, John stormed off. He only made it a few rows. 

“...John?” Sherlock’s voice, sounding so broken and wrecked, stilled John. He turned around slowly, just watching Sherlock as he stood looking at the ground. His hands clenched and unclenched as his shoulders tensed almost up to his ears. “John. I lost you once. Please don’t make me lose you again. I’m not asking to be let back in your life right away. I.. I don’t deserve that. I’m just asking that you don’t shut me out completely and forever. Losing you would… You said earlier that everything that made life worth getting out of bed for died with me. That feeling is mutual.” He refused to look up when the silence stretched on for a few moments. Certain that John had simply walked away, he took a deep breath to steel himself. He’d call Mycroft. Stay with him until he got something figured out. His brother certainly owed him a few favors over the past two years. A few of Sherlock’s targets might not have been entirely connected to Moriarty. 

He was startled out of his abstraction by a pair of worn boots stepping into his vision and a hand cupping his cheek. He looked through his lashes at John. He could still see anger, and plenty of it, but he saw relief and happiness as well. John rocked up onto his tiptoes and kissed Sherlock lightly.

“We have a lot to talk about and work through, Sherlock. Neither of us are denying that. I can’t say that I’m entirely ready to trust you again. Not fully. But I think you deserve to come home.” The corner of John’s lips twitched up into a bit of a smirk at the disbelief on Sherlock’s face.

“Home?” He reached out slowly, taking the sleeve of John’s shirt between his fingertips. 

John rolled his eyes and took Sherlock’s hand in his own. “Home, Sherlock. Welcome home.”


End file.
